Glad to have provoked what seems like a rare moment of sincerity, like a snail tentatively uncurling it's eye stalks.
The colonised, the enslaved, the bombed, the wretched of the earth, they do not have the luxury of debating the merits and morality of sanctions, collateral damage, interventions & market solutions. They know all too well what these euphemisms mean, they bear the long ache of the wounds, the trauma resonating endlessly through their national psyches - whilst the denizens of pirate states play their adolescent word games of justification.
-- We asked Amnesty International for broadbrush statistics on Saddam's crimes and were sent a report: 'Human rights record in Iraq since 1979' (K:\Press\Countries\Middle East and North Africa\Iraq\Iraq crisis 2002-3\Iraq's human rights record\Human rights in Iraq since 1979.doc).
The crimes are indeed hideous, peaking on several occasions: thousands were killed in Halabja in 1988, with thousands more killed in the crushing of the Kurdish uprising in the north and Shi'a Arabs in the South following the Gulf War in 1991. Amnesty writes of several hundred people, many civilians, killed and injured in southern marshes in 1993.
As for the last ten years, Amnesty reports of 1994: "scope of death penalty widened significantly" with "reports of numerous people executed". In 1995: "hundreds of people executed". In 1996: "Hundreds of people executed during the year, including 100 opposition members". In 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000 the same words are used: "Hundreds of executions reported". In 2001: "scores of people executed". In October 2002: "some improvement" with "release of thousands of prisoners, abolition of certain decrees prescribing the death penalty. Jan 2003, repeal of Special Codes on branding and amputation - no longer permitted." These were, we can guess, cynical acts of desperation by Saddam Hussein facing imminent attack.
Amnesty "continues to receive reports of human rights violations, including arbitrary arrests and the continuing policy of expulsion of Kurds from Kirkuk to Iraqi Kurdistan". Amnesty has also collected information on around 17,000 cases of "disappearances" over the last 20 years, the real figure may be much higher.
These crimes are hideous enough, of course - Saddam +was+ a murderous Third World dictator - but notice that the numbers of killed are reported in the hundreds every year, not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, and not millions.--
In June 2007, a British polling firm, Opinion Research Business (ORB), conducted a further study and estimated that 1,033,000 Iraqis had been killed by then.
While the figure of a million people killed was shocking, the Lancet study had documented steadily increasing violence in occupied Iraq between 2003 and 2006, with 328,000 deaths in the final year it covered. ORB’s finding that another 430,000 Iraqis were killed in the following year was consistent with other evidence of escalating violence through late 2006 and early 2007.
Just Foreign Policy’s “Iraqi Death Estimator” updated the Lancet study’s estimate by multiplying passively reported deaths compiled by British NGO Iraq Body Count by the same ratio found in 2006. This project was discontinued in September 2011, with its estimate of Iraqi deaths standing at 1.45 million.
Taking ORB’s estimate of 1.033 million killed by June 2007, then applying a variation of Just Foreign Policy’s methodology from July 2007 to the present using revised figures from Iraq Body Count, we estimate that 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed since 2003 as a result of our country’s illegal invasion, with a minimum of 1.5 million and a maximum of 3.4 million.
These calculations cannot possibly be as accurate or reliable as a rigorous up-to-date mortality study, which is urgently needed in Iraq and in each of the countries afflicted by war since 2001. But in our judgment, it is important to make the most accurate estimate we can.
Numbers are numbing, especially numbers that rise into the millions. Please remember that each person killed represents someone’s loved one. These are mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, sons, daughters. One death impacts an entire community; collectively, they impact an entire nation.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/03/15/iraq-death-toll-15-years-after-us-invasion
...droid said:...whilst the denizens of pirate states play their adolescent word games of justification.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...ddam-on-the-bloody-road-to-power-1258618.htmlIn the middle of the Cold War the CIA took Iraq very seriously. In 1959 Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "Iraq today is the most dangerous spot on earth." More specifically the danger to western interests came from an intense, unmarried army officer with a thin voice called General Abdel Karim Kassem, who had just overthrown the Hashemite monarchy installed by Britain to rule Iraq at the end of the First World War.
As soon as he took power in 1958 Gen Kassem began to offend Britain and the US. They suspected his alliance in the streets with the powerful Iraqi Communist Party. He withdrew Iraq from the Baghdad Pact, the US-backed anti-Soviet alliance in the Middle East. He appointed British-trained leftist bureaucrats to run government ministries. Most important, in 1961 he nationalised part of the concession of the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company and resurrected a long-standing Iraqi claim to Kuwait.
Britain had lost its primacy in the Middle East with its failure to overthrow Nasser in Egypt during the Suez crisis in 1956. The US was taking over its role as the predominant foreign power in the region. The CIA decided to use the Ba'ath party, a nationalist grouping with just 850 members but with strong links to the army. In 1959 a party member named Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, aged 22, had tried to assassinate Gen Kassem in Baghdad, but had been wounded in the leg.
In return for CIA help Mr Aburish says the Ba'ath party leaders also expressed willingness "to undertake a 'cleansing' programme to get rid of the communists and their leftist allies." Hani Fkaiki, one of the Ba'ath party leaders, says that the party's contact man who orchestrated the coup was William Lakeland, the US assistant military attache in Baghdad.
Accused by the Syrian Ba'ath party of co-operating with the CIA, the Iraqi plotters admitted their alliance but compared it to "Lenin arriving in a German train to carry out his revolution." Warned of plots against him, an over-confident Gen Kassem said: "I myself am the father of conspiracies."